Google Halts Google Authorship Effort

If at first you do not succeed, try again. I suppose it is in that spirit of adventure and perseverance that has led Google to be the company that it is today. While there has been plenty of hits with Google and its services/products before, this does not mean that there are no misses at all. In fact, yet another particular Google service known as Google Authorship has bitten the dust – having been around for a mere three years.

When it first launched, Google Authorship showed the face of the person (if a profile picture was uploaded earlier on, that is) beside whatever they have written on a website that was tied to said person’s Google+ account. Earlier this June, there was no more showing off of the author’s profile picture because Mountain View wanted to bring together both mobile and desktop experiences. Efforts to see this intention to be realized eventually discovered that having Authorship snippets took up too much space on a smartphone’s screen, which was why that was dispensed way with.

However, Google Authorship is officially pushing up daisies now as Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller has more or less made mention of its passing. Apparently, this particular feature failed to work as Google intended among its users, which means Google Reader would have some company now in the digital afterlife. Except for one thing – I found Google Reader to be infinitely more helpful than Google Authorship, how about you?